Great Northwest Wine: Cheers to the holidays with affordable Northwest red wines

If your wallet is feeling a little light from holiday spending, yet you still need to find a few bottles of wine for parties or a midweek meal, then there still are plenty of red wines to be found in the magical $15-and-under category.

Larger wine producers tend to dominate our lists of “best buy” wines because they can make wine in larger amounts, thus cutting costs in labor, equipment, grapes and bottles. That certainly is true in this column, with such companies as Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, Precept Wine and Milbrandt Vineyards crafting six of the nine wines reviewed here. All should be easy to track down at your favorite wine merchant.